On June 14, 1982, Danbury police question Ku Klux Klansmen after stopping them for riding up and down Main Street in Danbury shouting racial obscenities and advertising an upcoming rally in the city. Photo by Carol Kaliff/ The News-Times

On June 14, 1982, Danbury police question Ku Klux Klansmen after stopping them for riding up and down Main Street in Danbury shouting racial obscenities and advertising an upcoming rally in the city. Photo by

The Klu Klux Klan, led by Grand Dragon James W. Ferrands, held a cross burning ceremony in Danbury in April 1982, dedicated to Dimples Armstrong, a Danbury science teacher whoo headed a committee that wrote a teacher's guide on the KKK.

The Klu Klux Klan, led by Grand Dragon James W. Ferrands, held a cross burning ceremony in Danbury in April 1982, dedicated to Dimples Armstrong, a Danbury science teacher whoo headed a committee that wrote a

"This wasn't the friendliest place for minorities," said Gladys Cooper, who arrived in the city in the 1970s. Cooper is chairman of the city's Board of Education and has been on the board for 20 years.

Robert Cherry, 87, who has been a Danbury resident since 1942, said he remembers going into restaurants and not being served and seeing African-Americans denied jobs.

The city was segregated in the 1970s, Cooper said. The majority of African-Americans lived in the Eden Drive and Laurel Gardens housing projects.

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Population change of black community
In March 1980, Danbury's population was 10 percent black, or 6,000 people.
Today, the city's black population is 7.2 percent, or 5,824 people.

Many white people lived in the Clapboard Ridge section.

"You just didn't go in that area," Cooper said.

Samuel Hyman, 73, said there was more integration in the public schools, but John Cherry, a retired school teacher at Pembroke who grew up in Danbury, said he was the only African-American student in his classes from kindergarten to eighth grade.

He said he didn't have a black classmate until he got to Danbury High School. In his graduating class in 1968, there were 17 black students, he said.

Cooper said there was a lot of racial tension between white students and black students at the high school.

Dimples Armstrong, who was a science teacher at Danbury High School during the 1971-72 school year, recalled hearing an announcement for teachers to keep students in their classrooms because there was a big fight, or riot as some called it, on the front lawn of the school.

Many people said fights between black and white students went on for almost the entire decade.

There were fistfights, rock throwing and name-calling, Cooper said.

"It was just one disturbance after the other," she said.

At the college level, Ku Klux Klan pamphlets were distributed at WestConn in 1979.

About 400 people, white and black, marched silently on Main Street in retaliation. The group challenged Mayor Don Boughton to enact ordinances and stiffen penalties for distributing racist literature.

But Boughton told The News-Times the only ordinance he would consider implementing was making people who wanted to march pay for police services themselves rather than use taxpayer dollars. At the time, the cost was $4,000, he said.

The NAACP helped enforce the civil rights laws that were passed in the early 1960s, Hyman said.

"It took an awful long time for things to change," said Hyman, a former president and current member of the NAACP.

Ku Klux Klan members told The News-Times in 1982 that they dedicated their cross-burning ceremony on private property on Spruce Mountain Road to Armstrong, a black resident who has lived in Danbury since the early 1970s.

In 1980, a cross-burning in Scotland, Conn., had surprised many people because cross-burnings were usually associated with the South, Armstrong said.

Many teachers throughout the state were getting questions from their students about the cross-burning, but they did not know what to tell them, she said.

As a result, Armstrong, who was a member of the Connecticut Education Association, led a task force that was responsible for creating materials to distribute to teachers.

The project took about a year to complete, and when it was finished, Armstrong and the task force received a lot a news coverage for their work, she said.

She was also asked to make presentations for teachers and at churches.

"My name was out there as the anti-Klan person," even though the lesson plans her task force put together were objective, Armstrong said.

Several Klansmen attended one of Armstrong's presentations at a church and sat in the front row, making "all kinds of noises," she said.

They were not dressed in their white robes and hoods, she said, but she recognized some of their faces from the research she had done.

"They weren't going to listen to anything a black woman had to say," she said.

Armstrong, who presented with a partner who was a white male, said the Klansmen walked out of the room when it was her turn to speak.

A short time later, as Armstrong was getting ready for church one Sunday morning, her phone rang.

"Are you afraid?" a friend asked Armstrong.

"What are you talking about?" Armstrong asked.

"You can come stay at our house," the friend said.

Armstrong, who still didn't know what her friend was talking about, was advised to read the April 4, 1982, edition of The News-Times. That's when she saw a picture of a group of hooded people wearing white robs standing around a torched cross.

"The Klan dedicated the ceremony to Dimples Armstrong, a Danbury science teacher who headed a committee that wrote a teachers guide on the KKK," the caption under the photo read.

Paul Steinmetz, who today is an official at Western Connecticut State University, was a reporter for The News-Times at the time and covered the ceremony. He said the Klan members told him they held the event because Catholics, Jewish people and minorities had too much control over things.

"I was personally outraged," Steinmetz said.

Armstrong worried about the people who were followed by the KKK and what the Klan's next actions might be.